As a result, while armies still fielded line infantry regiments for certain restricted purposes, foot soldiers were almost universally despised as useless for serious combat. The modem battlefield, it was commonly said, was far too deadly for foot soldiers to survive on for more than a few minutes. Warstriders were the arm of decision in twenty-sixth-century combat.
But Dev had been both striderjack and infantryman, and seen the battlefield both from the vantage point of a warstrider linkage and from the dirt and blood and terror of a crunchie. One of the first things he’d done after being initiated once again into the Assassins had been to suggest the creation of special Combined Arms Groups, or CAGs.
Stalkers were deadly opponents in combat, but the greatest threat to striders were large numbers of Gammas. Men in combat armor could not face Alphas, but they could carry firepower enough to kill Gammas. Light striders, Dev had suggested in his report to HEMILCOM, machines like the LaG-42 Ghostrider or the RLN-90 Scoutstrider, could be assigned to work with line infantry platoons. To solve the mobility problem, the infantry could be transported in ascraft, Lightnings or Stormwinds, which were already part of a combined arms team when they flew close ground support with warstriders. Combat, Dev contended, might become a close-knit deployment of the three military arms—striders, ascraft, and ground troops.
HEMILCOM was still reviewing his concept, a notion that in some circles was considered heresy. In the meantime, Katya Alessandro had swung the temporary loan of an infantry platoon to the Assassins, put Dev in charge of them, and told him to give his CAG idea a try. They called themselves Cameron’s Commandos.
For almost seven months he’d been working with Sergeant Wilkins and her troops, evolving tactics, and drilling, drilling, drilling. When the Thorhammers were assigned to Operation Jigoku, he’d found immediate employment for them, manhandling the new crustal penetrators into position as Assassin warstriders mounted guard.
He found it easy to work with them. They were First Platoon, Bravo Company, Second Loki Regiment, the Midgardian Ulvenvakt. Most of them, he’d already met.
The new team had already proven itself in combat, too. Dropping crust-penetrating depth charges on Xenophobe SDT complexes was safer than tangling with Xenos one on one, but it was not without a certain risk of its own.
The last of Dev’s foot soldiers clambered aboard a grounded Stormwind, leaving the gray sphere alone on the ground three hundred meters away. With the shriek of turbines and intakes, the VK-141 lifted off in a swirling cloud of dust. “All personnel clear of the drop area, Lieutenant,” Wilkins said in his mind.
Dev switched back to Katya’s frequency. “Ready to drop, Captain. We’re set for timed detonation at seventeen hundred meters.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Stand by.” Still tuned to her link frequency, he caught her side of a rapid dialogue with HEMILCOM. By agreement with the Imperials in Asgard, the penetrator warheads were inert. They could only be armed by a coded linkage initiated personally by Shotaro Takahashi, the Imperial Daihyo.
“We’d better move back ourselves, Captain,” Dev pointed out when she was through. “The charts show a shallow tunnel layer here at five hundred meters. Could be a problem.”
The warstriders began making their way north, toward a low ridge overlooking the plain. Other vehicles, striders, transports, and hoverscats, were already gathered there. A squad of infantry, wearing the black and red armor of Cameron’s Commandos, stood and cheered as he stilted his way onto the top of the hill. He lifted his right arm, fist-heavy with its Cyclan-5K autocannon, in salute.
“Hey, Lieutenant!” Private Dahlke yelled, using his external speaker to send his voice booming through the thin Lokan air. “Let’s drop it right down their damned throats this time!”
He thrilled again to the godlike power of man-become-machine, knew that it was more than the electronic TM-high of implant wired to AI.
He belonged.
“This is it, Lieutenant,” Private Rosen yelled. “The big one!”
When Operation Jigoku had commenced months before, aiming the new crustal penetrators had been more art than science. Xenophobe subsurface deformation tracks could be plotted holographically by combining input from three or more DSA detector stations, but the data was fuzzy, the picture of the Xeno tunnel networks woefully incomplete.
Later, more detailed three-D maps had been AI generated, as the techs learned how to interpret the reflected shock waves from multiple nuclear detonations deep within the planet’s crust. The destruction of a Xeno complex could actually yield far more information about tunnel complexes and SDTs in the area than had been known before the attack, and follow-up strikes could seal thousands of kilometers worth of underground passageways.
Now there was the promise of a whole new generation of weapons technology, meson scanners that could reveal the interior of a planet as easily as medical nanoprobes revealed the inside of the human body, and robot penetrators carrying warheads thousands of kilometers into the deepest and most inaccessible Xenophobe nests.
Well, those were still on the drawing boards, and the way things were going, they might not be needed at all. They hadn’t been doing badly with echo mapping and straight-line penetration drops.
“Lieutenant Cameron?” Katya asked formally. “Will you do the honors?”
“Gladly, Captain.” Code flickered past his vision. Takahashi was in the circuit, tied in through stationary orbit comsats since the Asgard Ring was below the horizon. The Daihyo was feeding down the code groups, changed daily, that would release three nuclear warheads to Hegemony forces on the surface. “I confirm weapons free. Warhead Three is now armed and ready for release.”
“Stations One and Two report weapons free, armed and ready for release.” The voice was that of a controller at HEMILCOM HQ, relayed through the satellite net from Asgard. He had the self-important, pedantic tone of the technician reporting phenomena, rather than of the warrior dealing in death. “All stations, stand by.”
Gently, in his mind, Dev found the frequency of the inert sphere. A particular code group would activate its penetrator fields.
“All stations,” HEMILCOM said. “You are clear to initiate drop sequence.”
“Right,” Katya said. “Let ’er go!”
Dev triggered the activation sequence and sensed a single, powerful magnetic surge as the penetrator’s fields switched on, pulsed once, then stabilized. In the desert, a kilometer away, the sphere vanished, sinking rapidly beneath the desert sands.
“Chicago Three,” Katya reported to HEMILCOM. “On the way.”
He waited out the seconds, watching them flicker past as his implant marked their passage. With their magnetic fields full on, penetrators tended to fall through distorted rock at a steady speed of about five meters per second. The Xenophobe DSA complex was seventeen hundred meters down, which meant a time delay of over five and a half minutes.
The problem, as it turned out, was that the Xenophobe complex was not a single underground path of distorted rock, but many of them, dozens of tangled mazes occurring in layers at different depths. The most shallow set of passageways, according to the three-D seismic maps, was only five hundred meters down. In less than two minutes, the crustal penetrator would pass that first Xeno nest.
No one in HEMILCOM knew what the Xenos thought about traveler spheres stolen from their own technology zipping through their subterranean realm; hell, they still couldn’t agree on the question of whether or not Xenophobes thought at all, at least in ways that were meaningful to humans. What was known was that the spheres left behind a vertical highway of distorted rock. When this trick had been tried in the past, often the Xenos at the shallower layers followed the spheres’ paths back to the surface, almost as if they were… curious.
Dev’s internal clock registered two minutes.
“Ah, Station Three, we’re picking up a DSA,” HEMILCOM HQ reported. “Force four-three.”
“The traveler?” Katya asked.
“Th
at’s negative, Three. Contact is rising, depth now approximately one-two-zero meters, force five-five.”
“They’re coming out to play, then,” Dev said. “Stand ready, people.” He ran a last check of his Scoutstrider’s weapons systems, then activated the bolt on his right-arm autocannon, snicking home the first 27-mm shell.
On the sea bed, a plume of smoke erupted from the spot where the sphere had rested moments before. A shiver transmitted itself through the ground, and then the smoke grew thicker, a black pillar spreading toward Loki’s perpetual overcast.
Something was moving within the smoke. “Spotter four-seven,” a voice called. “I have a target.”
“Captain?” Dev asked, deferring to the company commander.
“At your discretion, Lieutenant.”
“Lieutenant Benson,” Dev called. “The target is yours. Fire!”
To his right, a squat, four-legged Calliopede loosed a salvo of T-30 rockets, like white-hot flares streaming tails of smoke. They struck the half-glimpsed shape in a ripple of explosions that lit up the fuming, volcanic cloud and sent shock waves rippling through the ground.
More Xenos were appearing second by second, however, rising through the channel of distorted rock and scuttling out onto the surface. In moments, every warstrider in the line had joined the fire, sending volley after volley of rockets, shells, and energy into the eldritch shapes spreading out across the salt desert.
Radio became garbled; the hunters switched to lasers, maintaining a steady flow of coordinating communications that picked targets and brought them down, quickly, cleanly, efficiently. Large Xenophobe travelers were wrecked before they could shapeshift to combat mode. Pieces writhed and squirmed on the sand until they were fried by particle beams or lasers. Two Xenozombies, a Ghostrider and a Warlord, appeared and were immediately slagged into immovable junk. Overhead, a trio of AV-21 Lightnings darted and turned and stooped on shrill turbines, adding their deadly payloads to the killing ground in crashing cascades of flame. Communications relayed from Chicagos One and Two reported that there was fighting going on at both of the other sites as well.
Dev leaned into the recoil of his heavy autocannon as it slam-slam-slammed its rapid-fire stutter, hurling explosive shells into the chaos of the killzone. He concentrated on the Alphas. His CAG troops took up positions to either side of the Scoutstrider with practice-honed precision, ignoring the thunder of the striders’ artillery overhead, burning down the Gammas as quickly as they appeared.
No Xeno machine came closer to the ridge position than fifty meters.
Internally, Dev’s clock continued counting down the seconds. Five minutes, forty seconds after the penetrator vanished, Dev began listening with every sense his Scoutstrider possessed, straining to detect some sign that the warhead had detonated.
He heard nothing, of course. If the traveler had exploded on cue, then in the first millionth of a second, a gas bubble had been created over a mile beneath his feet, a cavity tens of meters across filled by a seething cloud of plasma at temperatures well over a million degrees, and pressures reaching millions of atmospheres. In the hydrodynamic phase, a stage lasting for a few tenths of a second, those temperatures and pressures created a shock wave racing out in all directions from the blast’s center, traveling at or above the speed of sound in rock. Just how fast that would be depended on the density of the rock, but it would certainly be several seconds at least before the shock wave reached—
He felt it, a distant shiver at first, then a hard thump against the flanges of his Scoutstrider’s feet. A visible shock wave flickered across the desert floor.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice of HEMILCOM HQ reported in his mind, “we have had positive detonation on all three devices.”
Outside, the troops of the 2nd Loki broke into cheers. Dev tried to picture what had just happened far beneath the surface, and failed. Theoretically, the blast wave melted several meters of rock around the initial cavity and turned the rock for hundreds of meters farther plastic, or crushed it into rubble. The precise effect on the Xenos themselves was unknown, but nothing physical could survive overpressures of millions of tons per square centimeter, or the shearing action of solid rock flexing like a wave flicked down a length of rope.
Dev had gone through this operation fifteen times now, and each time he was surprised that the violence unleashed in the sunless depths of Loki’s crust didn’t break through to the surface. There was no crater, no plume of smoke, no leakage of heat or radiation, just that tremor… and a legacy of aftershocks over the next few days as the blast cavity collapsed and filled with rubble.
But a vast, labyrinthine maze of Xenophobe tunnels had just been trapped between three simultaneous nuclear blasts, and eliminated. If the picture of Loki’s crust the tectonics boys had been assembling over the past couple of months was accurate, it was the last nest of Xenophobes on Loki.
The war was over.
“It’s over. …” he thought, loudly enough that his AI transmitted the words.
Outside, the celebration was continuing, soldiers in red and black armor capering about like five-year-olds, even the striders gesticulating with their weapon-heavy arms as though they were waving and cheering. Dev was… numb.
“Say again, Lieutenant?” Katya said.
“Sorry, Captain. Thinking out loud. It’s just hard to believe it’s over.”
“You think it is?”
“Isn’t it? Our last precombat brief said this was the last major nest. You think there’re enough survivors to reconnect?”
While the Xeno DSA tunnels could be mapped seismically, no one could be certain that all of the underground Xeno paths were being picked up. Too, if they were going to nuke every kilometer of tunnel, the task would take years and leave much of Loki’s crust a battered, radioactive hell. The strategy so far had been to identify and nuke the major Xeno nests, the “cities,” as they were called, destroying the big ones and isolating any that might have been in the tunnels between blast areas. Were those isolated Xenos still alive? Could they rejoin with other survivors and recreate their tunnel system?
The question had occupied HEMILCOM and Imperial strategic thinking for most of the past months, but there simply were no hard answers. Human forces on Loki would not be able to relax. Who was it, Dev wondered, who’d said once that eternal vigilance was the price of freedom? On Loki the prize would be not freedom, but survival.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Katya said. “But I do know the war’s not over for us. Haven’t you heard the latest who-was? We’re being shipped out.”
“Huh? Where?”
“Who knows? Maybe the powers that be figure that, if we were able to beat the Xenos here, maybe it’s time to take back some of the other territory we’ve lost. Like Lung Chi.”
Dev tried to examine his own feelings about that, but felt nothing. He still felt dazed. “I thought we belonged to Loki.”
“We belong to the Hegemony Guard, Lieutenant. We go where they send us. Me, I bet it’s Lung Chi.”
“I think… I’d like that,” Dev said. He remembered the last time he’d seen his father alive, and felt a new eagerness. “I’d like that a lot.”
But military decisions have a logic of their own that rarely meshes with the likes or fears of the personnel who carry them out. Other events had been taking place far from Loki, events that demanded a far broader strategy.
Their destination was not Lung Chi.
Chapter 23
It is the Emperor’s express wish that the astounding discovery made at Altair be followed up without delay. You are hereby requested and required to organize a military expeditionary force, to be placed under joint Imperial-Hegemony command, and to be composed of the following units…
—Orders to General John Howard
from Imperial Daihyo Takahashi
C.E. 2540
The ship was called Yuduki, a poetic Nihongo name for the evening moon. Classified as an Imperial armored troop transport, she was 33
0 meters long and massed 48,400 tons. Her hull was divided into three unequal sections. Running aft for half her length was the flat, bulky drives section, cluttered with sponsons, heat radiators, and K-T drive nacelles. Forward was the small, blunt wedge housing primary sensors and communications gear. Amidships, three flattened, pylon-mounted bricks, each sixty meters long by ten thick, rotated ponderously about a central core. Within the core were bridge, tactical center, life support, engineering, and cargo spaces, as well as all AI and linkage electronics; the slow-rotating spin modules, generating a carousel’s out-is-down artificial gravity, had been divided into separate quarters for the ship’s complement of forty-one and troop bays for her passengers.
No attempt had been made to streamline Yuduki’s cumbersome lines. She was designed to navigate from orbit to orbit and the godsea in between, not the turbulence of planetary atmospheres. Nor had much attention been paid to the comfort of her passengers. Each accommodations module was divided into three levels, and those decks reserved for the Thorhammers were crowded to the point of claustrophobia, over twelve hundred men and women packed into narrow compartments with bunk beds stacked four deep. Since getting rid of heat was the number one problem of ships in the godsea, and since the stomachs of many never did adjust to the odd sensations of spin gravity with its attendant Coriolis force and disorientation, the enlisted accommodations were widely viewed as a preview ViRsimulation of Hell.
Officers had a bit more personal space and the semiprivacy of thin-walled cubes, bunking four to a room. Most comfortable were the spaces reserved for regimental use, mess hall, Common Room, officers’ lounge, and the equipment bay where the stridertechs continued to service and fine-tune their multiton charges. There was also the recreation deck, a space in the ship’s zero-g core equipped with recjack slots. Since it could only accommodate fifty at a time, recjacking liberty was rationed out at four hours per person, one day in five, with officers allowed six hours of RJ every other day. The release of ViRdramas, games and sports, of mental strolls in wide-open spaces and electronic sex with partners real or imaginary, was the one factor that let so many people share so little space without going insane. The threat of curtailed recjack privileges was a better disciplinary motivation than the threat of court-martial.
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